


Old Habits

by Indian_Ink



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Noodle Dragons, Post-Recall, Pre-Relationship, Teammates to Friends, strangers to teammates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-13 20:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7984693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indian_Ink/pseuds/Indian_Ink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ever since the collapse of the Calado building, Symmetra’s been having doubts about Vishkar’s methods. A visit from an agent of the supposedly disbanded Overwatch only makes things more complicated.</p><p>Formerly titled "White Sheep", now a series of connected oneshots!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. White Sheep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, Overwatch. Or, as I like to call it, "Emma you don't even own a device capable of running this game". But you see, I made the mistake of watching The Last Bastion one day, because I'm a sucker for gentle giant robots discovering the beauty of nature, and then I got sucked in. And then I made the mistake of getting curious about what The Shipping™ is like and came across [Casual Magic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7701484) and thEN this fic strolled into my mind one day while taking a shower.
> 
> I guess what I'm trying to say is, I've never actually played this game, so my apologies if things are off. Also, I haven't published fic online in literal years so I just wanted to post something and thus haven't really proofread this as thoroughly as I would normally have liked. I'm going through that with another fic in another fandom and I just wanted to get something out of my system, you know?
> 
> Also also, this fic is highly based around the events of Symmetra's comic "A Better World", which you can read online for free. I'm not sure how much sense this makes without reading that first, haha.
> 
> ANYWAY I hope you enjoy!

Pests were unheard of in any of Vishkar Corporation's cities. She had never once had to set out a rat trap in her days at the Architect Academy and none of her neighbours had ever had a roach problem. Yet somehow, despite their efforts with bug repellents and zappers, mosquitos managed to persist. They certainly didn't _thrive_ , Satya could proudly proclaim, but from time to time there would be an annoying little bump somewhere to deal with.

Rio de Janeiro, she decided, was like a mosquito bite that itched and itched and _itched_ and though she knew scratching at it only exacerbated the problem, she couldn't stop.

Sanjay had encouraged her to move on, focus on other projects, and she had, for a while. But then news came in of an uprising - one of the citizens had stolen Vishkar sonic technology and the people were actually driving the company from the city that had improved so dramatically. It wasn't long before the nagging uncertainty that she had thought gone had risen back to the surface.

 _The fire in the favela... Was that part of the plan?_ she had asked Sanjay, the morning Rio's new city centre was opened.

Not "yes", not "no". _How could you think such a thing?_ he had replied.

It worried her.

\---

Idle hands were the Devil's playthings, the saying went, and though she didn't believe in the Devil, the rest was true enough. Her work kept her mind occupied and away from her doubts, which were carefully packaged up and shoved away to deal with at a more convenient time.

It was at the end of a rather satisfying workday that she began to learn there was no convenient time for doubt.

She's making her way across the grand tiled floor of the apartment building lobby. Just a minute or two and she'd be up the elevator and back in her home, when the woman at the front desk calls out to her. "Miss Vaswani! I'm glad I caught you."

Satya makes her way over, more than a bit annoyed at the interruption. "Yes?"

"A gentleman came in about an hour ago requesting to see you. I told him you were working, but he seemed interested in waiting. He's still here, if you'd like to meet him."

Interesting, though nothing out of the ordinary. Thanks to her travels as a field agent, she often had visitors, people she had managed to entice abroad who had needed a but more time to think things over. The apartment building had private meeting rooms on the ground floor for just such a purpose, free for her and the the other field agents to use. She had been taking some time after Rio, so whoever this was had obviously needed quite a bit of time to think. "I'll meet him. What room is he in?"

The woman frowns, looking slightly perplexed. "He insisted he would wait in the garden. He said his name was Genji Shimada."

The garden? Now that was strange. It was built into one of the building's courtyards, with many trees and a small pond. It was too... messy for her to spend much time in but it was nice enough. No businessman she had ever met had _insisted_ a meeting take place outdoors. Vishkar, or at least the parts she worked for, was about architecture, not landscaping.

The garden is empty aside from her guest, but someone could have filled it to the brim with strangers and she would've spotted him right away. 

Genji Shimada, it turns out, is a robot. 

She's not familiar with his make - his head is a bit more angular than the rounded shape many civilian omnics have, and his "eyes", really one long line under a visor-like shape, are green instead of pale blue. But that is not what strikes her as unusual. It's the fact that he is dressed in a man's kimono - a plain kind of silvery green. She's been to Japan a couple of times, and while she would never call herself an expert, such garments were saved for special occasions, weren't they?

"Ah, Ms. Vaswani!" he says, turning from where he had been gazing at a flower bed and bows deeply, showing respect. He sounds almost pleasantly surprised by her arrival. The setting, his clothing, and now his tone have set her rather on edge, and when she bows back, it is only a polite greeting.

He doesn't seem at all bothered by it, and maybe she had imagined it, but she thought she had even nodded a little, as though he had expected such a reaction. "Would you care to sit?" he asks, gesturing widely to a wooden bench nearby.

She'd really rather not; there's no way to tell what sort of animals make their perch on it when no one was around. "Certainly," she says.

They sit next to each other and she waits for him to speak. He's quiet only for a moment, folding his metallic hands in his lap, but it seems to stretch onwards in Satya's mind. Usually any meetings like these cut straight to the heart of the matter, but Genji Shimada was taking his time and it was all so _different_. The mosquito bite feeling was returning.

"I apologize for the suddenness of all this, but my purpose here is delicate," he finally says.

What is _that_ supposed to mean? "Mr. Shimada, if you don't mind my asking, what company do you work for?"

He turns his head a mite towards her. "Overwatch."

A small breeze ruffles their clothes and the leaves of the trees. "Overwatch?" she repeats. She has no idea how she's supposed to react, and Genji's face is an impassable mask. So she says what she knows. "That's impossible. The Petras Act was signed five years ago. All Overwatch activity was-"

"Deemed illegal," he finishes. "Just because something is deemed against the law, does that mean it stops?"

She closes her mouth and glares. Of course she knows that, but- what kind of fool would call together an illegal task force years after it had been disbanded? "And what kind of business, exactly, does Overwatch want to do with Vishkar Corporation?"

"Not with Vishkar, Ms. Vaswani. With you."

She stares at the robot wearing a kimono sitting in the garden, wondering if maybe she would wake up from this ridiculous dream soon. "With me," she finds herself parroting his words back to him.

"It was only a few months ago that the Calado building in Rio de Janeiro collapsed in the middle of the night. You were there. Plenty of eyewitnesses saw you." A bitterness rises in her throat. Her stomach twists. She had been trying not to think about it ever since it happened, but his words bring back the smell of the smoke, the way the whole earth had shook when the building exploded. Shimada continues. "The reports say that you rushed into a burning to save a young girl. She surely would've died if you had not intervened."

Satya waits for him to go on, but he only watches her silently. What does he want her to say? "Yes, that's true. What of it?"

"You repeated the act many times over, even after rescue crews arrived. You risked your life several times for those of the innocent." He leans forward slightly. "Ms. Vaswani. You are a hero."

"I hardly think so," she replies with a clenched jaw. Heroes were brave and noble, and she had been neither that night. It wasn't some sort of valiant code of honour that had led her into the flames. She had tried to put a word to it for weeks, but it isn't until then that it comes to her. _Guilt._

It's impossible to tell how he reacts to that, but given his brief silence she imagines she's poked a hole in his confidence. At the very least he seems surprised. "Regardless, I thought you deserved to know the truth of what happened that night." He reaches inside the folds of his clothes and brings out a thin pale blue folder. She's snatching it out of his hand before he even gets the chance to offer it.

"The _truth?_ " Her hands shake. She had known what the file would be the second she saw it, but seeing Vishkar's logo and the word CLASSIFIED stamped on the front still fills her throat with fire. She storms away from the bench as though just sitting next to him scalds her. "Why would I believe anything a _thief_ has to say?"

She could leave right now, tell the front desk, have him arrested within the hour. But then he speaks again and like a fool, she decides to listen. 

"You're right." He's remarkably calm for someone admitting to stealing secret information from the company that built the city he is in the middle of. "Anything _I_ could possibly say about that file is now moot. Its information is in your hands now and you are free to do what you like with it. You could return it to its place and report me. You could even burn it, if you like." 

He stands, and folds his hands inside his sleeves. "It is your decision to make, Ms. Vaswani," he says as he leaves.

And she lets him. She lets him leave, because the itch has returned and Sanjay's words come back to her. _How could you think such a thing?_

She stares at the folder in her hands, still shaking.

\---

Utopaea was clean, orderly, especially after curfew, when everyone headed inside to end the day. The buildings were all glass and white and gold, illuminated by clear blue lights. She had spread out the folder's contents in a clean, orderly fashion, in two rows across her coffee table. It helps steady her hands.

The truth is eight pages long. Some are printed back and front, but there are some that are just new versions of old drafts, integrating the suggestions and notes scribbled in the margins.

Sneaking into Calado that night had made no difference. The building was always meant to collapse into the favela, even if she had managed to dig up enough dirt on Henrique Calado. 

The dirt would've just been an added bonus, an opportunity to kick at an already downed opponent. The tragedy and the damage and the lack of an alternative caused by the 'accident' were what would guarantee a sealed deal with the mayor, and Vishkar did so like guarantees.

Vishkar had _always_ planned on letting innocent people die in order to repair Rio.

Her heart had been pounding ever since she got her hands on the folder. She tries to take deep, calming breaths but somehow that only makes it that much harder to breathe. She has to do something, has to focus on one single thing until everything else _slows down_ , but nothing comes to her. Her mind is racing, but her thoughts consist of a solitary chant: breathe, just breathe, breathe, just breathe...

Satya manages a brief sweep over the papers on the table as her hands clutch at the edge of table. _Murder_ , she thinks. _We're murderers._ There had been security guards in the building. The pain in their voices had echoed in her ears as they had come into range of her turrets and she had run into her teleporter. Had their last moments been spent struggling to free themselves?

She feels sick. The room tilts, threatening to spin.

There is a ninth page, she realizes suddenly. No, not a page. A scrap. A series of numbers in an unfamiliar hand.

Numbers. Numbers she can focus on. A code? An address?

_And what kind of business, exactly, does Overwatch want to do with Vishkar Corporation?_

_Not with Vishkar, Ms. Vaswani. With you._

A phone number.

She can't remember the last time she's felt so clumsy. Her fingers fumble at the keypad, and for once she opts to use the receiver instead of the headset. It will give her hands something to do.

There's static and a garbled, computerized voice before something clicks. There's silence for a long aching moment and in that moment, Satya Vaswani is utterly alone.

"...Ms. Vaswani?" Genji Shimada's voice comes through the phone. He has the gall to sound surprised and she wants to laugh and scream and cry all at once. The _asshole_. He comes along and all of a sudden the carpet is pulled out from under her, the wool pulled back from her eyes.

"Vishkar raised me," she hisses. "Took me from my home in the slums, my family, dropped me into a world of beauty and order." Her voice shakes and she's such an idiot, idiot, _idiot_. What's too good to be true often is, she had heard, but somehow it had never applied to her, to Utopaea, to Vishkar. "And now- and _now-_ "

_Now what?_

"I was just a pawn," she says. Finally her heart starts to relax as the realization trickles over her. "I always have been."

The world is quiet again, but Utopaea's silence is no longer comfortable. It feels alien and unwelcome.

"When I was young, I was also part of... an organization." Genji's voice comes back and she nearly jumps. "The truth was never kept from me; I knew what we did, and who we did it to. Yet I did nothing to stop it. I kept my head down and continued on as usual.

"Eventually I was forced to realize that I couldn't condone our actions any longer. I was banished from the only life I knew." There's obvious pain in his voice. "I was very alone and very afraid.

"When I heard of you in Rio, and as we learned more of Vishkar, I recognized something in you that was similar to a younger me. I didn't want your realization to be as painful as mine. My apologies."

She draws her knees up to her chest. Normally she would tell herself, _I am_ Symmetra. _I will not be afraid. I can do things no one else can._ But Symmetra was a name Vishkar gave her. Vishkar gave her everything. What was she without them or their technology? Just a lonely little girl from Hyderabad.

"I have nowhere to go," she hears herself say.

"You do," he replies immediately.

\---

She's not sure what to pack. What exactly do you pack in one bag when you decide to run away from the only life you've ever known?

Everything else could be bought again but she hates the thought of waking up in wherever-Overwatch-is and being without a change of her own clothes. 

And her mother's necklace, a flat silver disk on a heavy cord with a sun or flower engraved in the centre. She descends the stairs towards the lobby, her photon projector in its case on her hip, the flat silver disk and its heavy cord clutched in her hand. Sometimes, on particularly tough testing days at the Academy, she would sneak it into one of her uniform's pockets, and smooth it into her palm when the teachers called her up for her turn.

She heads out the front door; leaving through the back would be too suspicious. Curfew didn't apply to graduated architects and higher ranking employees, and it certainly didn't apply to Symmetra, one of Vishkar's finest, but she still finds herself avoiding the angles she knows the security cameras film. She spins elaborate excuses in her head just in case she encounters anyone else as she fiddles with the strap of her pack across her chest, and finds it much more difficult than weaving light.

But the streets are empty, the click of her heeled boots bouncing off the sidewalks and the walls as she turns into the narrow series of alleyways. They were far narrower than those of other cities, barely wide enough to allow two people to walk next to one another shoulder to shoulder. It was to discourage such things as sneaking, and she remembers she had agreed with the logic in urban planning meetings. In a different time and place, maybe she would've stopped to contemplate the irony.

The numbers displayed on the side of her visor start to count down as she approaches the co-ordinates Shimada had given her. When it reaches zero, she's come to a crossroads, the alleyways stretching off in front and off to either side. She waits.

There is the barest mechanical hum off to her right, and she turns in time to see the lights on Genji Shimada's mechanical body come to life, throwing a soft green glow into the darkness around them.

The kimono is gone, and there is a sword on his back and a shorter blade on his hip. He comes forward, stride confident yet utterly silent, as though his utter presence is somehow muffled to the world. The sharp degrees of his helmet-like head are striking and intimidating and somehow graceful all at once, like a bird of prey. The phrase 'wouldn't want to meet in a back alley' comes to mind, and yet here she is.

He goes to bow in greeting but she raises a staying hand.

"I'm not really in the mood for pleasantries," she says.

"Very well," he says, nodding. "A friend of mine is nearby - she's waiting on the roof of a warehouse with an escape craft."

"Lead the way."

He leads her carefully through another series of alleyways and it is, Satya thinks, the closest to complete silence as two people can make while still moving and breathing. There isn't even a whisper of the usual mechanical whirs and hisses from Shimada's body, and she wonders again at his make. He seems designed for stealth, but robots designed for any kind of combat, secretive or no, were all but banned after the Omnic Crisis. Was Overwatch producing its own robots?

"Shimada?" she whispers. They come to the end of an alleyway, and she peers around his shoulder to watch the cameras oscillate slowly over the street. They're heading into the industrial area of the city. They'll have to time this just right if they want to cross.

"Yes?"

"What company made you?"

He cringes. "Aha, why do you ask? Are you having second thoughts?" He asks, glancing over his shoulder at her, a hint of teasing and something else in his voice. She may not be the best at reading other people, but she's had enough teasing in her life that she recognizes the tone. She's not sure what the other is. "I can assure you, I'm not an omnic."

"That is of no matter to me," she says. It seems as though Genji is about to reply, but she doesn't give him the chance. "Now!" she says, and they dash out of the alley and across the street, weaving through the camera's blind spots.

They melt into the shadows again and resume walking. "I did not mean to embarrass you," she adds quietly. "I've never seen a robot like you."

When she turns to look, he avoids her gaze, staring up the wall closest to him. "I...am not a robot," he says eventually.

Satya's eyes narrow as she regards him sceptically. There was no visible human tissue anywhere on him. What did he mean...?

She lets the thought drift off as he stares down at his right hand, flexing it as though he had just noticed it was there. "Cybernetic replacements," he says.

A chill creeps down her spine. _Replacements._ If they were replacements, just how much of the original Genji Shimada was left? What could have possibly happened-?

"It's all right," he says, in that same soft voice he had used on the phone. "I have made my peace with-" he searches for a good term, "my new body, though it took a long time."

They start walking again, and now it's Satya's turn to be embarrassed. How stupid of her. She shouldn't have been so bold, so _rude_.

She stops when she realizes he's fallen behind.

Shimada has stopped, one hand on the hilt of his blade, his head turned to the side. Apparently he's listening to something, as a second later he says, "Your associates are not exactly sneaky, are they?"

She glances down the way they've come. There's no sign of movement, but she thinks she hears the tail end of a whisper.

Her heart thumps in her chest. She knew it was only a matter of time until someone noticed something out of place, but she wasn't prepared for the rush of emotion that floods back into her.

Satya decides to ignore the despair and loneliness and betrayal. She focuses in on the anger and taps a button on her headset. "No. They're not."

She can feel Shimada watching her, curious, as she turns on her heel and continues to walk out of the alleyway. It's only when he's safely emerged beside her on the street does he understand what she's activated.

 _Utopaea was created using radical hard-light technology that enabled our architects to shape the city's streets, utilities, and living spaces in the blink of an eye,_ Vishkar's public website had said. But it's one thing to read and another thing entirely when an empty workshop made of metal and concrete and whatever else turns to a great blue box made of light before your eyes. Satya Vaswani is not just a travelling agent with business skills, she's an architect and over the course of maybe five minutes, she has rearranged the city block into a tangled wall of specialty shops and manufacturers. The alleyway they had just come out of was gone, replaced with a parts shop for kitchen appliances. Genji touches the wall, just to check that it was indeed solid again.

"They also aren't very smart," she says and the first smile she ever gives him is full of triumph.

He can't help but give her a very impressed chuckle.

They continue onwards, and as they approach the row of storage warehouses, Satya's hand hovers over the case on her hip. She keeps expecting Sanjay to appear from around a corner, flanked by a group of security guards. He would attempt to dissuade her, surely, and she would fling the truth back in his face. Vishkar and everyone in it had blood on their hands. She would shout it until her throat was sore if she had to.

But he never does. They reach the warehouse peacefully, no climactic final showdown in sight. _Real life is not like the stories you read as a lonely little girl, Satya,_ a part of her mind tells her. She barely takes in her surroundings as Shimada guides her up a ladder and over metal catwalks to wherever the roof access is. _You can rush into the flames all you want, but the kind helpful little girl will always end up scarred._ She tries not to think about the other accidents that had happened on other missions, with other employees. _People will always die because of you, because of Vishkar. But that's the price we must pay for a better world._

The cool evening breeze rushes across her face and takes her thoughts with it.

She takes in the rooftop and the tiny white aircraft parked not far away. Blue and white and gold, just like the city around them...

Just a quick glance over her shoulder. Just one last look, she thinks, but another thought overrides it. _You can take a look from the plane._ She takes a deep breath and strides forward, past where Shimada waits by the door, takes the far seat, and straps herself in.

She's barely aware of anything Shimada or the pilot say to each other, determinedly staring out the window, as though that will somehow lift them into the sky. Satya twists the strap of her bag tightly in her hands.

The staring contest with the gravel-lined roof of the building pays off, and the ship gently hovers into the air. Satya watches as the world outside slowly revolves and her window lines up with the direction she and her cybernetic guide had come from.

She sees the block full of industrial buildings she had rearranged. It's hideous, like someone had taken the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and forced the wrong pieces into the wrong holes. Her fingers twitch - she wants to fix it, _needs_ to fix it - but she clutches the armrest of the seat to steady them.

There are piercing beams of light sweeping through the streets on the other side of her wall. The would-be final confrontation she had prevented is looking for her in the pre-dawn haze.

Maybe she shouldn't have made the wall so impenetrable.

After that, it seems like Utopaea is gone in the blink of an eye. The blue lamps and golden glass disappears, and she stares down at the Indian countryside, still badly bleeding from wounds sustained in the Crisis.

"You can unbuckle now if you want, luvs! Looks like clear sailing from here to home," a chipper voice comes over a speaker a few minutes later. It's then Satya realizes that there's a wall between the cockpit and the passengers. She and Shimada are alone.

She's alone with a stranger on a strange ship heading to who-knows-where, to join an illegal organization who seemed to think she was a hero.

She scrambles to undo the buckle on her chest, fingers stumbling over one another.

"Vaswani-san?" Shimada's voice is clearly concerned. Is that why he had slipped back into Japanese, given her a title worthy of respect? She doesn't know. There's so much _she doesn't know_.

"Fine, I'm fine." Is it just her or was it unbearably hot in here? "I just- I just need to-" She tears the strap of her bag off her, deposits it on the floor. Her visor comes off, her photon projector. She slides to the floor, bringing her knees to her chest and hugging them. She takes a shaking breath, and rests her forehead down on her knees.

She just needs to breathe. Slow, steady breaths, Satya, she tells herself. Breathe and you'll survive.

But of course things can't be that simple and her breaths come in shorter, smaller gasps. Heat stings at her eyes, but she'll be fine, she'll be fine, she'll be fine...

She hears a click and a whir, a seatbelt retracting. She doesn't move, tightening into a ball. Keep breathing, keep breathing.

A hand places itself, cool and steady, on her back. She manages to hold herself together for all of a few seconds before she lets everything fall through her fingers like sand.

But she has an anchor, and for that she's thankful.

\---

"- and if you ever need anything, you just call me and I'll come runnin'!"

Shimada groans behind her, like it's a pun he's heard one too many times before. Tracer sticks her tongue out at him, but Satya hardly notices. It takes quite a bit of getting used to, meeting someone you had seen in holovids as a child in the flesh, it turns out.

Tracer's smile is full of gentle warmth. "But I'm sure Genji will show you around just fine. Once you've gotten the grand tour, you should drop by Winston's lab."

"Winston?" Satya asks. Her head seems to fill with stars all over again. "As in-?"

"Giant hyper-intelligent gorilla, defeated Doomfist, invents AIs in his spare time, single-handedly saved my life?" Tracer indicates the blue glow of the harness on her chest with a thumb. "One and the same!" She leans forward with a grin and says in a stage whisper, "He's very excited to meet you.

"Well, I should be going, don't wanna be late, meeting Pharah at the gym, she's gotta bit of jet lag, toodles!" The farewell all comes out in one breath, and then with a streak of blue light, Tracer is gone, zipping away from the landing pad and somewhere into Watchpoint: Gibraltar.

"Lena is very... sociable," Shimada says by way of explanation. He notices Satya's scanning stare around the area, squinting into the dark windows around them.

"I was expecting more people, somehow," she says. Where night had begun to ebb away in Utopaea, it was still dark here, and would be for a few hours still. Maybe everyone was asleep.

"They wanted to be here, but... You remember how I said I once went through a very similar experience?" He asks, rubbing the back of his neck. She watches the metal plates move subtly with the movement, fascinated for a moment.

"I remember," she says.

"When I was first adjusting to things here, I found crowds to be overwhelming. I thought you might feel the same."

Her eyelids, still heavy with dried tears, suddenly seem to become heavier. It occurs to her that she's gotten no sleep since the night before. Crowds were never easy to deal with for Satya, even less so when she's had little rest.

"You thought correctly," she says, running a hand over her face.

"Welcome to Overwatch, Symmetra," he says.

But with the way he says it, it sounds more like _welcome home._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title comes from TVTropes, and is "a character who rebels against an evil family."
> 
> The "escape from Utopaea" sequence thing did originally have a climactic final showdown, because I kind of wanted to emulate the cinematic shorts, with Utopaea being a hypothetical map where the buildings can move around on you, but I figured 'if Satya Vaswani made herself an improvised barrier out of a city block she probably did it really, really well'. Also, it gave me the opportunity to set up more parallels between these two losers, so I figured it was for the best.
> 
> Ah, hm, I think that's all I have to say. Until next time, folks! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ


	2. Methods of Meditation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Satya attempts to adjust to life without Vishkar. Luckily, she has Genji to talk to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to part 2 in this series of oneshots! I'm going with "collection of related oneshots" over "multichaptered fic" because I don't really have an actual ending to all of these various ideas floating around. (Not to mention that as the lore updates I will likely only get MORE ideas...) I chose "Old Habits" for the whole collection because the idea of "old habits are hard to break" is something I keep coming back to when thinking of these two and their relationships.
> 
> Fun fact: my laptop's power cord started literally smoking as I was proofreading this and I'm now posting/formatting a half-proofread thing from my iPad so! It is probably not as polished as I would like. Again. welllp
> 
> Anyway, on with the show!

The dragon's scales gleam sapphire in the flickering light of the surrounding fires. Hot breath rattles through gnashing golden teeth. Its eyes bleed bright blue, its glare boring into his heart.

The dragon _hates_ him. It's a thought so unheard of that it somehow must be true. The dragon loathes him, wants him gone, wants him _dead_ wants him to suffer.

His vision blurs with tears.

It's almost a relief when it opens its maw. He sees the fire rise up its throat, sees it rush out into the air, feels it envelop his body and burn and oh gods it hurts _it hurts_ and he screams but smoke fills his windpipe-

Genji awakes hacking, desperate to fill his lungs with clean air. Sitting up in bed clears his airway. From there, he's able to realize that the Watchpoint around him is calm and silent. The thunder that booms and rumbles inside his skull and the lightning that flashes behind his eyes are just that - inside his head.

He rests his face in his hands, and the cool metal reminds him of who and where and when he is.

The loathing is still there, but at least his dreams are haunted by an inaccurately fire-breathing Dragon of the South Wind and not...

He hasn't heard anything from Hanzo, and the months are piling on top of one another since his visit to the castle that was once his childhood home.

Genji decides he'd much rather go for a walk than think on that for too long.

The sound of the ocean is never far in Gibraltar, especially in the quiet of the night. Listening to it helps to focus on his breathing and each step he takes. Walk gently upon the earth, one of the brothers had taught him, for without it, we have nothing. Had it been Master Mondatta?

But that is another route he doesn't want to go down tonight. In the here, in the now, he tells himself, letting his feet take them where they may. He descends a staircase into the lower hallways and continues to wander. He passes many rooms, filled with long meeting tables and chairs gathering dust. It was unlikely Winston would call any meetings in them any time soon. They are rebuilding, but they are still little more than a skeleton crew.

So it comes as a surprise when, several empty hallways later, Genji notices a light left on in one of them.

The lower levels are also home to Gibraltar's workshop. Darkness steeps the distant walls lined with parts, but a desk lamp illuminates the space Satya Vaswani has managed to clear for herself at a nearby table.

She's fallen asleep in the chair, her head resting on her folded arms in front of her. It can't be comfortable, and Genji immediately decides that he's going to have to wake her up, if only because he can imagine Athena's voice saying things about proper posture and sleep habits.

A younger, rasher part of him suggests simply picking her up and carrying her back to her room, but he likes to think he's picked up _some_ manners as he's grown older.

He touches her right shoulder, the one not sheathed in her gauntlet, to make sure she feels it. "Ms. Vaswani, are you...?"

His words die in his throat just as Symmetra starts awake and glances up at him. When he had spoken, his voice had sounded different, and he realized very very quickly why that was.

He had left his helmet in his room.

Genji can only watch as her eyes scan over the scars that criss-cross his face, his metallic jaw, the odd patches on his skull that hair never managed to grow back over. 

Then he blinks and time moves forward again. He and Satya are stumbling over each other's apologies as she pushes herself to her feet.

"It was rude of me to stare," she says, and indeed, avoids looking him in the eye.

He could lie and say that he was fine with her seeing him like this, but she'd catch on quickly when he went back to wearing his mask around people he had known for years.

He could agree, say that yes, it was rude, but she had just woken up, and other than knowing that he was human, had no idea what his injuries were like under his armour.

So, finally, he decides to take a third option. "To be honest, I would be more concerned if you _didn't_ stare," he says. 

Satya turns to look at him, eyebrows raised. She just manages to withstand the urge to wince. He pretends not to notice.

Genji shrugs a shoulder. "Besides, I am the one at fault. My nightmare distracted me, and I forgot my mask."

"A nightmare?" Satya asks, and her curiosity overpowers her embarrassment and, if he's being honest, what he guesses is disgust. "Are you-?"

"I am used to them," he replies. "I have had them for many years." Being the son of a yakuza clan leader meant being a prime target for kidnapping from a young age. That in turn meant having a healthy supply of fears his mind could toy with as he slept. The horrors of that life and the one after in Blackwatch only added to them as he grew.

"Still. I have experience with insomnia," she says, nodding, determined. "If you would like, I can make you some tea?"

Genji feels himself grin. "I would love some."

\---

It takes a bit of sifting through the kitchen cupboards, but Satya eventually finds Fareeha's stash of loose leaf teas. As she busies herself with the kettle and cups, he takes a seat at centre table.

Normally he would volunteer to help a relative newcomer around the kitchen, but he finds himself remembering his own early days of Overwatch. Any time someone offered to help him, he had refused, snappish and frightened. His feelings towards his family switched between unbearable sorrow and a burning fury as easily as one would flip a coin. Despite the calm and polite air Agent Symmetra has about her, he feels sure that some of the same feelings were bubbling underneath her surface.

She sets a steaming mug down in front of him and takes a seat beside him. Genji inhales deeply, taking in the soothing scent. 

"It's a blend of peppermint and chamomile," Satya explains. She blows lightly on the surface of her tea. "Normally I would add more to it, but... I didn't think to bring any tea with me."

"It smells wonderful, Ms. Vaswani," Genji assures her. 

She purses her lips, furrows her eyebrows.

"Is... something the matter?" he asks.

"Please, call me Satya. Or Symmetra. Being called 'Vaswani' feels too much like..."

"Like home?"

"Like _Vishkar_ ," she corrects, venom seeping into her voice.

Yes, he remembers. 'Home' had been a word that stung for him too.

"How about Vaswani-san, then?" He had called her that on the plane ride home, not really thinking about what came out of his mouth. "Normally, I try to stay to English titles but trading one old habit for another may be easier. 'Ms.' for 'san'."

"Should I call you Shimada-san, then?"

"If you would like."

She attempts a small smile behind the rim of her mug.

"If you do not mind my asking, why were you working so late into the night, Vaswani-san?"

Her smile drops and she takes a sip of her tea. When she puts her mug down, she stares at the table top, thoughtful. Genji takes a sip of his own, watching her above the rim.

"It may sound disrespectful," she says carefully. "Of one of your old friends."

He chuckles. "Well, I can assure you that many of my old friends can let you know just how disrespectful _I_ was when I first met them."

This doesn't put Satya at ease. In fact, her shoulders only seem to grow tenser, her grip around her mug tightens. Finally she brings herself to say, "I met Torbjörn today."

Genji can't help it. He laughs.

He can _hear_ the glare in Satya's voice as his eyes squeeze shut. "Well, if you were only going to _laugh_ at me-"

"No, no, I'm sorry Vaswani-san." He manages a glance up at her as the laughter subsides. "I am not laughing at _you_. I am laughing at _him._ "

"I do not understand."

"Because Torbjörn is _never_ in an approachable mood. Except, perhaps, when there is alcohol involved." He checks Symmetra's face as he takes his mug up again but the jibe gets no response from her. "What happened?" 

She still looks perplexed but answers anyway. "I was in the lab with Winston and Athena. We were going over the agents that Miss Oxton will be returning with tomorrow, when Torbjörn came in. Winston introduced us and-" she glares at the far wall, "he proceeded to ask me many questions about hard-light technology." 

"Ahh." Yes, this was all sounding familiar. "And you could not answer them all." 

"Yes!" There is a slight quaver to Satya's voice that she quickly recovers from, though he still spies some angry heat in her cheeks. "He wanted to know how manipulating photons could create something out of nothing, and the exact materials that make up the constructs... They never told us everything. 'Company secrets', they would say." She turns her glare down to her tea. "Perhaps I should not be surprised that I felt like such an idiot." 

"You are not an idiot," he says, and part of him is surprised by the firmness to his voice, "for believing the lies of the people who raised you. It is not _your_ fault that they lied to you. It's theirs." 

She glances up at him, meets his eyes with her own for a few seconds, before looking away again. They sit for a moment in silence, drinking their tea. 

"My first meeting with Torbjörn was like yours. He asked many questions I had no answer for, because they I had never thought to ask them." 

Satya shifts forward in her seat. "And what kinds of questions were those?" she asks, curious. 

He reaches up and scratches at an itch on his neck that isn't there. "It may sound a bit...far-fetched." 

"More far-fetched than creating something out of nothing?" She raises her mug and sips her tea with such an air of finality that Genji feels compelled to straighten in his chair, rise to her challenge. 

"An excellent point," he concedes. He's never felt so hesitant to explain the dragons before. Maybe because he knows Vishkar likely didn't make much room for fairy tales. "I- well, members of my family can summon... Spirits." 

Satya's face is blank, her mouth a straight line. After a moment, her eyebrows furrow. "Spirits, as in ghosts?" 

"Oh, no." Genji shifts in his chair. "They are more like guardians or companions. I could show you, if you'd like." 

She leans away, and the slight scrape of her chair moving back joins the idle hum of the refrigerator for a second. Her eyes scan the darkened corners of the room behind him, unsure of where to look. "Right _now_?" 

"It will only take a moment," he says, giving her a smile. 

Again, he watches as curiosity fills her eyes. She nods. 

He stretches out his right arm to lay it across the table, his fingers balled in a fist. Genji focuses on slowly opening each finger, watching the metal joints as they move and the faux wood grain of the table just beyond them. He focuses on his arm, the metal and wires, the skin and blood and bone, the place where they meet an inch or so above his elbow. He remembers the tattoo on the marred skin, the one he got when he was sixteen. 

Calling the dragon warms him, fills him with a strength that shakes off any uncertainty that plagues him at the moment. Green light rises from him like the steam that had risen from their cups before they had cooled. The light takes form into a dragon, or perhaps, the dragon simply decides to put on its shining armour. There's really no point trying to differentiate the light from the dragon itself. 

His dragon yawns, yet makes no sound, curled gently around his arm. A feeling of annoyance and mild concern, one not his own, nudges against his mind. He responds, sending the sleepy spirit a feeling of reassurance. It lays its head down, its chin on his shoulder, and huffs. Genji understands that he's interrupted a perfectly good nap for no good reason. He laughs, silently replies that he had his reasons, and lets the dragon go. 

The lights fade away, leaving behind a cool tingling sensation, like a gentle rain. He feels lighter and sways in his chair. Satya reaches forward to touch his arm but he catches himself by grabbing the edge of the table. "I am all right. Sometimes it leaves me a bit lightheaded, is all," he assures her. 

There is a light in Satya's eyes and a gentle, awed smile on her face. "That was...incredible," she breathes. 

Genji hasn't seen her smile often in the short time since they've met, but he thinks it is definitely something he wants to see more of. He has to pause to run a hand through his hair to get his thoughts back in order. 

"Torbjörn asked me all kinds of questions about the dragon when he heard about them. Where do they come from, why can only members of my family summon them, what kind of energy do they consist of... On and on." 

He slides his fingers through the handle of his mug and pulls it toward him. 

"It was strange. My clan had just betrayed me, left me for dead. And yet, in my mind I was still one of them. He was asking after family secrets as though I was-" 

"A traitor." Satya finishes the thought for him. 

She stares into the last remains of peppermint leaves and chamomile in her cup. 

"When I performed poorly on a test at the Academy, or a business deal fell through, I would focus on some sort of project. I would create one myself if I had to. _That_ is why I was working so late on a biometric lock no one needs." She shakes her head at herself. "I would do anything to avoid feeling like a failure." 

"I would just run away," he hears himself say quietly. "I would avoid my family for days by staying with friends. We would explore abandoned buildings, or spend hours in the arcade. But someone-" Hanzo, it had always been Hanzo, "would find me and bring me back. And then I would be furious at myself for making them worry." He huffed out a humourless laugh. "More than one practice dummy met a nasty end by my hand." 

Satya looks as though she's about to say something, but lifts her hand to cover her mouth as she yawns instead. Genji laughs again, warmly. "It seems your tea has done its job well," he says, and stands up to collect their empty mugs. 

"It seems so," she replies. 

"For what it's worth," he muses as he makes his way to the sink, "I think a biometric lock will be useful, once there are more of us. But, perhaps you should bring a clock to the workshop with you next time, so you know how late you're working." 

She nods to herself. "Yes, I think I will. Thank you, Shimada-san." 

"Thank _you_ for the tea," he replies, and they bow in farewell. 

\---

"Lena said she had some kind of a surprise," Fareeha's saying as he approaches.

Torbjörn grunts and crosses his arms. "With her, that could mean just about anything."

"Perhaps-" Genji begins, but is immediately cut off by his comrades' surprised shouts. Fareeha turns with a glare and punches him in the shoulder as he laughs. Ah, yes. He's forgotten how easy it is to startle people when all his movements are practically silent.

"Christ sakes, Genji," Torbjörn sighs. "I'm gonna tie a buncha tin cans 'round your ankles."

"I was thinking a bell around his neck," Fareeha says, smirking. "Like a cat."

"What's like a cat?" Winston asks, lumbering out of the doorway to stand beside them on the edge of the landing pad. There's a mug of coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other. Genji wonders how much sleep he got the night before. Tracer was returning with at least three members of their old family today, and Winston's enthusiasm for meeting heroes hadn't waned in the slightest over time.

"Genji," Fareeha answers. "He hasn't stopped sneaking up on us, even after all these years."

"It's hardly my fault," he grumbles, joking. "I was built for stealth."

"Hm. Maybe Athena and I can set something up, so he beeps any time he enters a new room," Winston suggests, grinning.

Torbjörn barks out a laugh and Fareeha adds, "Maybe make his nodes blink too, just to be sure."

"Hilarious, all of you," Genji says.

What is likely at least half an hour, but feels only like moments later, the Orca swoops in over the ocean, casting its massive shadow over the Watchpoint. Genji catches a glimpse of Lena through the cockpit's windows, who beams down at them with a wink and a grin as she brings the ship in to land.

The main hatch opens with a hiss, revealing a hulking silhouette already waiting to exit. Torbjörn has just enough time to yell "Brace yourselves!" before Reinhardt Wilhelm charges forward and sweeps three of them up in a crushing hug.

"Winston...!" Genji chokes out. He can feel Fareeha's cheek mashed against his faceplate and Torbjörn's mechanical elbow buried in his chest. "Make him stop!"

"Haha, no worries, my friends!" Reinhardt announces. "He was only spared because you three were in front!" The knight lowers them all to the ground, then turns to chase after the gorilla with a booming laugh.

After that, many things happen at once. Genji hears Athena's voice calmly warn Reinhardt against breaking Winston tablet just as Fareeha yells, "Jesse!" A woman around his age with long brown hair tied up in a ponytail shakes Torbjörn's hand, grinning with stars in her eyes. Lena comes flitting out of nowhere, a familiar stetson on her head, to check in with Winston, who is crushed to Reinhardt's side, one of the crusader's scarred arms flung over his shoulders-

Then Angela Ziegler is there, in a sunshine yellow blouse and a comfortable skirt. She's smiling at him, but there's a tightness in her eyes he spots immediately. He remembers how their last conversation went.

But that was some seven years ago, and now is a time for new beginnings. "Dr. Ziegler," he says, bowing deeply.

She bows in return. There's still a hesitance about her, but she grins. "Genji," she says. "Would it be entirely too cliché of me to ask how you're feeling?"

He laughs. "Much better than I was when last I saw you," he says. "I am a different man now."

Angela looks as though she's about to say something, but Lena comes zipping up before she can form the words. The stetson is gone from her head, but he catches a glimpse of Fareeha passing it to Reinhardt in the distance. "Genji, did you see my surprise?" Lena asks, bouncing on her heels. Again, no one has time to reply before Lena pouts slightly and glances about. "Hm, no, he's not here. Where'd he go?"

His stomach sinks like a stone. "He...?"

But then Lena giggles, "Oh, no, there he is! Quiet little guy, isn't he?"

He follows her gaze to the outer rim of the landing pad and his sudden dread and soaring hopes are completely forgotten. The only omnic he has ever known capable of levitation is there, floating next Agent Symmetra.

"MASTER!" Then he's running and throwing his arms around the omnic in a hug that nearly bowls them both over. He can't stop laughing, even as the two of them struggle to straighten up.

"Somehow, I knew you would react this way, Genji," Zenyatta says, as calm as ever. With two quiet clanks, he pats his student on the back.

"I thought you said you were unsure about joining Overwatch?" Genji asks, finally taking a step back and releasing his master.

The monk, having been briefly grounded by his student's running hug, pulls himself back into the air. He can only imagine what might be going through Torbjörn's head at that.

"Sometimes lies are necessary to pull off true surprises," Zenyatta muses. He looks off to the group still standing by the Orca's hatch and gives a thumbs up. Genji glances over his shoulder to see Lena grin and give a thumbs up in return.

"I was just introducing myself to Agent Symmetra," Zenyatta says, gesturing towards her. "She seemed surprised to know that I knew of her, as she did not know of me.”

Genji makes some sort of undignified choking sound. Oh. Right. He had forgotten to mention that, hadn't he? "Well, yes, uh- you see, Vaswani-san," he says, turning to her, "before I met you in Utopaea, I sought my Master's advice on whether I should try to recruit you."

"That is true," Master Zenyatta cuts in, "but Symmetra tells me she has been here for at least a few days now. Ample time to mention me." He places a hand over where his heart would be if he were human. "Have you forgotten me so quickly, my student?"

"What- no!" His cheeks redden under his face plate. His master had always had a penchant for good-natured teasing, but he hadn't expected him to launch into it quite this quickly.

"Well, now," a voice drawls beside him. Jesse McCree's elbow comes down to rest on the top of his head, as though Genji's some convenient wall to lean on. Why did his closest friends suddenly feel the need to stack embarrassment upon embarrassment on top of him? The _betrayal_ of it all. "What's goin' on over here?"

"These are two of our newest recruits, Jesse," he says from underneath his old partner's elbow. He gestures first to the floating omnic. "This is Tekharta Zenyatta, my mentor in the years since last I’ve seen you.”

"May peace be upon you," he says, raising a hand in greeting.

"And this is Satya Vaswani, also known as Symmetra."

"Greetings," she says, with a bewildered smile. He had had no idea what a cowboy was doing in the 21st Century either. He still didn't, really.

"Howdy." McCree grins and pushes back the brim of his hat with a thumb, to better look them both over. "So from what I heard on my way over, Genji here was talking up a lady behind her back?"

"So it would seem," Satya replies, giving him a sidelong glance.

_What was happening._ "I was not-"

"Don't worry. Genji here's too subtle for his own good sometimes," McCree says, finally removing his arm from its improvised resting spot to pat him on the shoulder.

"I like to think I have enough subtlety for the both of us," he explains to Satya, "considering his complete and utter lack of it." Then he reaches out and flicks McCree's completely ridiculous belt buckle, and it makes an incredibly satisfying _ping_.

More satisfying than that though, is the fact that Satya actually laughs, even if she tucks it behind her hand.

\---

They'll have to move to another Watchpoint eventually, Winston says, lest the authorities eventually track them down. After all his wanderings, Genji doesn't mind a semi-nomadic existence, though he hopes that wherever they go, the ocean will be nearby. The rhythmic in and out of the waves made an ideal environment for meditation, and he was pleased to find that his master seemed to agree. Many a dawn passes in relative silence between them as they sit on the sun-warmed stones over the sea.

Aside from her unexpected appearance on the landing pad the day the Orca returned, Agent Symmetra took care to avoid the growing crowds, and Genji would go most of the day without seeing her. The presence of Brigette, Reinhardt's "squire" (and she really did insist on being called that, unbelievably), seemed to provide a good buffer between her and Torbjörn. She worked with scrap metal, a hammer, and a welding visor like Torbjörn but was all but entranced by Symmetra's hard-light creations. Despite the friction between the two engineers, the workshop was a safe spot for Symmetra and that was where she could most often be found. He got into the habit of walking by about the time loosely labelled as 'Team Dinner Time', to make sure they all ate, that nothing was on fire...

But mostly it was to check on Satya. Even with the simple act of walking with her, Torbjorn, and Brigette to the mess hall every day, he worried he was hovering. During the early weeks and months of his new life, he had mostly preferred solitude, but if Satya felt bothered by the daily walks, she was very good at not showing it.

One day, as she falls into step beside him as Torbjorn and Brigette go on ahead, she says, "Shimada-san."

"Hm?"

"You and Master Zenyatta meditate each morning out by the sea, correct?"

He nods. "When the weather is good, yes. Luckily we haven't had much rain."

"Would you mind if I joined you?" She's staring quite intently at Brigette's ponytail. "I'm not sure how good I would be, but-"

"I'm not sure you can be _bad_ at meditating, Vaswani-san," he says gently.

"What I mean is, I would not want to be a distraction. I may... fidget." She glances down at her gauntlet, summons up a blue ball of light from within, and crushes it in her palm. And she thought his dragon was incredible.

"Does your fidgeting," and he has to actively make sure he doesn't draw air quotes around the word with his voice, because he wasn't sure how something as beautiful as _bending light_ could be dismissed as just _fidgeting_ help you relax?"

Satya thinks about this, frowning. "It helps me concentrate," she decides.

"Then you may have already begun to meditate," Genji says.

Her brows furrow. "How so?"

He laughs. "Master Zenyatta is better at explaining it than I am."

\---

"Have you ever found yourself so engaged in a task that you lose track of time?"

The three of them sit in one of the patches of short green grass by the sea, facing one another in a triangular formation. Technically speaking, Genji was the only one sitting _in_ the grass - Zenyatta floated a couple of inches above the ground, and Satya had conjured a seat for herself with a flick of her wrist. It had been the height of a chair, but she had pulled her legs up into the lotus position, and it had sunk gently down to the ground. She had allowed herself a proud smile at their compliments.

Satya's eyes flick towards Genji, but his mask is impassive as ever. "Of course," she says, turning back to the omnic.

"Then it is as my student says. You have already begun to meditate." Zenyatta laces his fingers together. "Often, our minds will be doing one thing while our body does another. But concentration, especially on a physical task, brings the two together again, and we can fully appreciate the moment without worrying about what time it is.

"And these tasks do not need to be stressful or tiring, either. It can be as simple as concentrating on your own breathing. As you breathe in, think _in_ , and as you breathe out, think _out_."

Genji spies a flicker of doubt cross over Satya's face and smiles. He had wondered the same thing when Zenyatta first took him through these exercises - did omnics even need to breathe?

But she lets her eyes slip closed and Zenyatta's voice invites them to listen to the waves and the call of the seabirds, the sensation of the sun warming the grass, the smell of the sea...

When the session comes to a graceful end, and Satya opens her eyes, she takes a moment to glance at her two companions, as though checking they were still with her.

"How do you feel?" Genji asks, offering a hand to help her up.

"Alert, but relaxed as well," she says, taking his hand and standing. She bows to Zenyatta, her hair flowing over her shoulders. "Thank you for the lesson, Master Zenyatta."

He laughs warmly. "Feel free to join us anytime you'd like, Satya. And you do not need to call me 'Master'. Neither does Genji - he does it because he is overly polite."

Genji snorts. "Me? Overly polite? It's as though you don't even know me, Master."

"And yet you persist in calling me 'master', even when you joke, Genji."

Satya hides her grin behind her hand.

_Betrayal_.

\---

Satya joins them often in their morning meditations. She rarely speaks, but that's something both Genji and his master understand very well. What matters is that when Genji pulls her to her feet and they all bow to one another, she has a tentative smile on her face before she leaves.

One morning, Satya approaches their usual spot with a small pile of papers in her hand. She creates her seat with a flick of her wrist and pulls herself up on to it, letting it sink down to the ground as usual.

But this time, with a swipe of her hand, she creates a small white board to set in her lap, like a portable desktop. She pulls light out of her gauntlet like a tailor may unravel thread from a spool, and bends it, shapes it, until a triangular prism made out of what looks like some clear blue crystal drops into her palm.

She glances up and catches Genji's eyes on her. "Ah- apologies, Vaswani-san, for staring."

"It is to be expected," she says, smiling. "I am breaking the routine."

"I would say you are adding to it, rather than _breaking_ it," Zenyatta suggests, and floats a little closer. "May we ask what you're doing?"

"I think Shimada-san will be able to guess," she says. At that, he lets himself lean forward slightly.

She places the prism down on the stack of papers, then slides one out from underneath it. She folds it in half, corner to corner, taking care that the sides align properly, and runs the crease between her painted fingernails to flatten it. She’s using a square piece of paper, Genji notices, one side slightly frayed as if she had torn a bit off of a regular printer sheet.

"Origami?" he guesses, and she nods.

"The straight lines reminded me of hard-light," she explains, folding the triangle in half again. "I thought it would be interesting to try creating structures in another medium."

The steps she takes are distantly familiar, and when she is done, quiet warmth steals into his chest. His dragon stirs within him.

A paper crane rests on the board in Satya's lap. "How lovely," Zenyatta intones.

"I once knew how to make the crane by heart," Genji muses. "It's been a long time."

"Would you like to keep it?" Satya asks, holding it up towards him.

He lets his smile carry through his voice. "I think what I would like more is if you could teach me again."

Origami figures start to crop up around the Watchpoint, collecting on table corners and lining empty shelves. All of them are white, made from irrelevant files Satya was helping Winston organize, but Genji promises his friends he'll get them proper origami paper as soon as he can. Zenyatta replies that he looks forward to the day his butterflies no longer have such empty wings.

One night, unable to sleep after a dream of his mother and paper flames, Genji finds Satya and Lena sitting together at the mess hall table. Lena tells him of the scary movie that had kept her up, and just as excitedly about the origami squirrel in-between her fingers.

"We were talkin' about our families and don't even ask me how I brought it up because I don't remember, but my pop-pop always said I was 'squirrelly'," she says. "So we keep on, but Satya here's been making it for me the whole time! Just brilliant, honestly."

Satya’s eyes are shining. "It was simple, really," she says. "I could teach you, if you'd like."

"She makes an excellent teacher," Genji adds.

The next time Genji wanders through Winston's lab, there are quite a few origami squirrels climbing about his monitor.

The morning after is one where Satya doesn't bring paper with her, and that is fine. Some mornings are suited movement and some are suited for stillness.

Genji closes his eyes and focuses on the ebb and flow of the waves, the ins and outs of his breathing. Sometime later, the feel of the sun on his armour is interrupted by Zenyatta's cool fingers gently touching his shoulder.

He had no way of knowing how long they had all been sitting there, but it seemed somehow shorter than usual. As he opens his eyes, he sees his master staring quite intently in Satya's direction.

Satya, in turn, is focused on the hard-light structure she stretches and squashes and splits into place. She's made herself a tiny hard-light butterfly, and once she repositions its antennae, she cups her hands underneath it. It hovers there, like a shining blue crystal. She holds her thumbs and middle fingers together, chewing at the inside of cheek, staring down her creation with golden brown eyes. 

Very carefully, her fingers shift, then flick. The butterfly beats its wings.

The three of them watch as it flutters away from her hands and lands on invisible legs, perching on Zenyatta's knee.

Satya finally lets out a small gasping laugh.

Genji somehow remembers how to speak as he watches her creation _crawl up one of Zenyatta's fingers_. "Vaswani-san- how did- _how_ -"

"I wasn't sure it would work," she admits. The butterfly takes off and flutters away, though it doesn't go very far before turning back.

"How were you able to get it to move?" Zenyatta asks. As the butterfly passes him, he raises a hand for it to land on, but it ignores him, as butterflies do. "And so realistically?"

"I... thought of how butterflies move as I crafted it," she says, bringing her hand up to her chin, thinking. "I didn't expect it to be able to land, seeing as it has no legs.”

"Would you be able to create other animals, do you think?" Genji asks. "Like your origami?"

"That's what I was thinking I'd try next," she says. What is probably the most beautiful smile he's seen yet is blooming on Satya's face, a excited pink in her cheeks he has never seen before. "But I think I would have to learn how they move."

"Athena could provide you with reference videos, I'm sure," Zenyatta adds. This time when he offers his hand as a perch, the butterfly returns to him.

For a long while, they simply watch it rest, opening and closing its clear blue wings.

\---

On the last night of their current stay in Gibraltar, Jesse proclaimed they ought to have a farewell campfire to the place Winston and Athena had called home for so long. ("Do you have _any_ idea how long it's been since I've had a good posse to settle around a fire with?") 

As the sun sets, the agents of Overwatch gather together kindling and what little wood they have - broken down pieces of old pallets they wouldn't likely use any time soon. With their small numbers all together in one place, Genji notices an absence, and slips away into the empty halls. 

A couple minutes later, he knocks on one of the bedroom doors. 

"Who is it?" She sounds distracted. 

"It's me, Vaswani-san." 

"Come in." 

The door to Symmetra's personal apartment slides open, and Genji cannot believe his eyes. 

Although her overhead and bedside lights are turned off, Satya's room is alive with a menagerie of light. The butterflies he's seen before, but two dragonflies dart by his head, and fireflies wander about near the ceiling. Three songbirds hop about on her desk, pecking at morsels that aren't there. 

"Genji?" There's a note of alarm in Satya's voice, and when he blinks he finds that he has sunk halfway into a seiza-style kneel. 

He laughs at himself, grateful that his mask hides the red of embarrassment from his face. "Apologies, Vaswani-san, I suppose it is instinctual of me to kneel in a place full of wonder." 

"Satya." 

He looks at her for the first time since he's entered the room. She's wearing a green version of her usual dress, her legs tucked up underneath her on top of her bed. "Master Zenyatta calls me 'Satya', so you can too, if you'd like." 

"Oh." He decides to sit next to her on the bed, tucking into the lotus position easily. If she has any complaints about him sitting so close, she doesn't show it. "I wasn't sure... But I suppose you did just call me 'Genji'." 

"Is that all right?" she asks. "I was worried you were about to faint." 

“Of course! In fact, I prefer it." 

"Then you could've told me earlier and I-" 

He raises a hand gently and she stops. "It is in the past," he says lightly, then adds, "Satya." 

Satya nods, but continues to look troubled. He's not sure what to do about that, so he watches the hard-light butterflies about the room for a moment. 

"Are you happy here?" he blurts. 

Satya doesn't move beside him and he's honestly a little afraid to look. Gods, what was he doing- 

"I mean, of course you're not- I mean- What I mean is-" _Shut up and breathe, you idiot_ , he thinks, which he manages. 

"That night, when you called... I never did ask if you _wanted_ to be a part of Overwatch, or if there was anywhere you wanted to go. Gomennasai." 

Silence. He thought he'd learned to find peace in it, but all he can think of now is how Satya is simply not saying anything. 

He hears the quiet thrum of her gauntlet activating and dares to look. She pulls a shining blue thread from her palm, stretches it out, and lets it snap back. 

"No, it is as I said that night. I have nowhere to go. My parents died in an accident a few years after I joined the Academy." 

He wonders how much of that accident was truly accidental. No doubt she did too, now. 

"And you may not have asked me if I wanted to join, but Winston did, a few days after I arrived." 

She watches the birds on her desk for a moment. "I have always wanted to make the world a better place. It is why I joined Vishkar in the first place. And whatever may have happened to the old Overwatch, this one is new, smaller. More manageable. And Winston is..." 

"Winston is Winston," Genji agrees, smiling fondly. 

He's glad to see Satya is too. "He sees so much good in the world - in everyone he meets. I knew after spending a few days with him that I could do more good here than I ever could if I was running away from Vishkar on my own. 

"I would not say I am happy here." She pulls the thread out of her palm again, holds it, then lets it snap back into the blue abyss. "But I am... content." 

His shoulders relax from a tension he hadn't realized he had been holding there. "I am glad to hear it." 

"Did you come here just to ask that?" Satya asks, tilting her head. 

"Oh! Ha, I had completely forgotten," he admits. "We are all having a campfire as a farewell to Gibraltar. Would you like to come?" 

Instead of answering, Satya simply says, "A... campfire." 

"It was Jesse's idea." 

"I figured." 

\---

Everyone is very relieved when Satya arrives and constructs hard-light seats and benches around the fire, because wheeling out swivel chairs from the lower levels feels like too much work. They're not 'proper rustic', according to McCree, but they're comfortable and there's no clean up involved.

She seats herself between Genji and Zenyatta, and only folds a few butterflies out of light to deal with the noise of the crowd.

S'mores, she finds out, are quite delicious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Jesse! You and your old-timey ideals! What's next? Horseless carriages?
> 
> Also, a thought I had since I was writing White Sheep that I forgot to share on here: can we call these two Lightsaber. We can do that right


	3. Public Relations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vishkar goes public with the fact that one of their Architects has gone rogue, reminding Satya that she has betrayed the people who raised her. A chance encounter with one Hana Song manages to draw her out of her shell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have I mentioned I have no idea what I'm doing, because I have no idea what I'm doing
> 
> This chapter actually may have a little more D.Vinity friendship than Symmenji friendship, but don't worry, he's still here. (There's going to be so many friendship tags on this fic good lord) 
> 
> On with the show!!! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

**UTOPAEA, INDIA** \- _At a press conference held yesterday, the Vishkar Corporation reached out to the public for assistance in locating a missing employee accused of theft._

_“Satya Vaswani disappeared from our city two weeks ago today,” Sanjay Korpal, a Vishkar business negotiator and former partner of the accused, said. “She left no note of resignation, and illegally took company property with her. Classified files were also found in her apartment._

_“Despite these transgressions, we do not want Ms. Vaswani harmed in any way. She has been with us from a very young age. We would like your help in finding her and bringing her home,” Korpal continued. He appeared emotional as he left the stage._

_Vishkar has come under fire recently for its methods, particularly when dealing with the citizens of the cities they are hired to work for. Brazil’s latest musical sensation, Lúcio Correia dos Santos, led the people of Rio de Janeiro in a successful series of riots against the company a month ago. Dos Santos has spoken about at every opportunity since._

_The company currently has no leads on where Vaswani might have gone, but are offering a reward for her safe return of-_

Satya turns off her tablet before she can read how much money her head is worth.

Because that was the truth, wasn’t it? They could claim to the world that they didn’t want her harmed, but she knew now that the size of the audience didn’t affect Vishkar’s ability to lie.

How foolish did they think she was? ‘Korpal appeared emotional as he left the stage’. Of the two of them, _she_ had been the one prone to emotional outbursts. She was the one who had lost her temper with Mayor Fonseca Melo during their last deal in Rio, criticizing her choice of Calado over Vishkar. Sanjay would never make such a beginner’s mistake as getting visually upset during such a massive press conference, unless it was a clumsy attempt to appeal to her homesickness.

Since they had arrived in Watchpoint: Hammershus, Satya had thrown herself into whatever project she could to keep her mind off Vishkar. She spent her days fixing old pipes and arguing with Torbjörn how best to go about it; she typed up old files for both Winston and Angela; she meditated and created new light sculptures with Zenyatta and Tracer.

But when night came and she laid in her bed with nothing but her own thoughts for company, she missed Utopaea. She missed its views of regal, shining skyscrapers. She missed walking its immaculate streets and admiring the beautiful light-crafted sculptures and fountains. She missed having her own kitchen with her own spices and teas. She missed the closet full of clothes she had bought herself. She even missed her rack of nail polish, neat and tidy and abandoned on her vanity.

The agents of Overwatch had been nothing but kind towards her, and here she is, locked in her room, reading news reports of her old company and missing selfish, indulgent little things.

She has no one to blame but herself, anyway. It is as Genji had said, back when they had first met in the garden of her apartment complex. She could’ve burned the files, or had him arrested. She could’ve stayed in Utopaea, safe and unknowing.

Her stomach growls, interrupting her thoughts.

Oh. When was the last time she ate? She could make herself lunch, but the thought of meeting the eyes of other Overwatch agents on the way to the kitchen isn’t very appealing. They would ask how she was feeling and she wouldn’t have a short, easy answer to give.

Still, there’s the chance the kitchen and halls would be empty this late in the afternoon, and she could slip in and out without anyone seeing her. She almost asks Athena on her way to the door, until she remembers the AI would likely have the same concerned questions as everyone else.

But Satya stops dead in her tracks when the door slides open. Someone has left something on her doorstep, right where she might’ve stepped on it, had she not been more careful.

It’s a white bread sandwich, secured to its plate and kept fresh by a shield of clear plastic wrap. She picks it up and peels off the sticky note that waits on top.

_Please don't forget to eat. - Winston_

Something sticks in her throat and she has to retreat back into her room, in case anyone who might’ve been in the hallway saw her tears.

She could, if she wanted to, bring herself to hate Genji Shimada for turning her life upside down and displacing her from the only home she’d ever known. 

But Winston, Zenyatta, Lena? She could never hate people who had been nothing but kind and understanding to her despite the place she came from and the extra target she put on their backs.

She could never regret meeting them.

* * *

The sandwich Winston made and dropped off for her manages to get her through the rest of the day, but some time after midnight, her stomach voices its upset at having gone empty all evening. Figuring there would at least be less people wandering about, if any, she heads out in search of the kitchen.

She brings a handful of her newest constructs with her. Modified from her firefly prototypes, the floating orbs glow softly the same way the insects do, but have larger, mouldable bodies, meant for squishing between fingers like stress balls. They sail along behind her as she makes her way down the dark, quiet hallways, throwing blue pools of light on the walls.

Satya breathes a sigh of relief when she sees that Hammershus’s kitchen is empty. Her self-imposed isolation meant she hadn’t had the chance to find where all the ingredients and appliances were, but she decides she'll start small. Sugar couldn’t be too hard to find, could it?

As she rummages through the cupboards, she hears something shift in the dark behind her. She pauses, but brushes it off. Simply a sound of the building settling in the night, probably. 

She’s just celebrating her luck at finding a container of cardamom powder when something shifts in the dark again.

Her stomach clenches as she feels eyes on her back.

Satya's thinking about how much time throwing a plastic container will give her, when a calmer part of her mind reminds her that Athena would’ve warned her of some kind of threat. She leans forward to hit the light switch underneath the cupboards.

She’s alone in the kitchen, but she’d forgotten it leads into one of the castle’s common areas through an open doorway. A young woman she’s never seen before sits on one of the couches there, looking backwards over her shoulder. Satya can see the white glow of a computer screen on the edges of her face and hair.

The stranger takes off her huge, pink headphones and waves. “Annyeong!” She chirps, smiling.

That was Korean, wasn’t it? She and Sanjay had nearly been assigned a mission there a couple years back, but that’s not something she wants to think about right now. She’s already spent enough time thinking about Sanjay today. Satya raises a hand in a surprised greeting. “Hello.”

“I don’t-” both she and the young woman (she really was quite young, Satya realizes the longer she looks) say at the same time. The woman laughs; Satya smiles.

“You first?” the stranger suggests.

“I was going to say that I don’t think we’ve met,” Satya says.

“Same here,” the woman says, fully turning around so she sat facing the back of the couch. She extends an arm out for Satya to shake. “I’m Hana Song.”

Satya leaves the kitchen behind to shake her hand. Her constructs follow after her, floating around her shoulders. “Satya Vaswani.”

Hana frowns, apparently trying to remember where she’s heard the name before. Satya braces herself for questions about Vishkar's recent conference, but Hana snaps her fingers as the pieces fall into place.

“Oh, right! Genji and Zenyatta mentioned you. The hard-light architect, right?”

She finds she prefers that over the _Vishkar_ architect. “Right.”

“So these are hard-light?” Hana grins, and reaches out to prod at one of the glowing baubles, which drifts away gently. “They’re awesome! I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

Pride balloons in Satya’s chest. “That is because no one’s _made_ anything like them before.”

“Wait, really? So you... _invented_ these? Like, all by yourself?”

With a grin, Satya raises her gauntlet and calls up a curtain of light for her to form. Hana starts back and watches it, entranced.

“What’s your favourite colour?” Satya asks her.

“What?” Hana shakes her head slightly and quirks an eyebrow at the question. “Um. Pink?”

Satya adjusts the ring around the hard-light dispenser in her palm, watching the colours shift through the spectrum, from blue to purple to pink. Changing colours has always been one of her favourite steps of the process, ever since she was a young girl, because it was a bit like holding an aurora in your hand.

From there, stretching the light and forming it into one of her wingless fireflies is easy. Within seconds, a pink one floats slowly away from her hands to join its pale blue cousins. A proud smile spreads across her face when she looks at Hana again, whose mouth has dropped open.

Satya pokes the pink one with a finger, until it floats towards the other young woman, like a tiny asteroid pulled into a planet’s gravitational field.

“So that’s definitely a ‘yes’, then,” Hana concludes, grinning back. She pinches the creation between two fingers as it floats by, squeaks, and retracts her hand. “Ohmygosh, can you _hold_ them too?”

Satya laughs. “Of course! I made them for-”

Her stomach growls loud enough that Hana looks at her and laughs too. “Right, I interrupted your search for a midnight snack. Do you want some help looking around? Brigitte showed me around earlier so I think I should know where things are. …That is her name, right? Brown hair, kinda tall, freckles…?”

Satya can still feel the heat of embarrassment in her cheeks, but she’s grateful that they’re standing in the dark. “Yes and yes,” she says. “I would appreciate any help you can give, and that is Brigitte.”

“Phew, good,” Hana says, slipping off the couch, shutting her laptop, and tucking it under her arm. “I thought I’d be used to this sort of thing by now, but getting everyone’s names straight in my head is still pretty tough!” she enthuses, following Satya back to the kitchen.

It isn’t until later, after they’ve rummaged through plenty of cupboards and laid out ingredients on the kitchen island, that she really mulls this over. “If you don’t mind me asking,” and judging by the smile Hana has when she sits down on a stool opposite her, she doesn’t, “what did you mean by ‘you thought you’d be used to this sort of thing by now’?”

“Oh, well, I’ve had days like this before - where you have to meet a whole bunch of people quickly, so you don’t get a lot of time to really set them in your head. Mostly with MEKA, but sometimes in the gaming circuit too.”

Satya pauses, blinking. ‘Gaming circuit’, ‘MEKA’? The second at least rung a bell, and she could gather that the former was a competition, but for what sort of game? She tries to ignore the shameful heat in her cheeks and her own horrifying stupidity by measuring out how much sooji she needs.

“Ohhhh my gosh,” Hana suddenly groans and smacks herself in the forehead hard enough that Satya jumps. “I am such a- ugh, there’s an English word- uggggggh. Sorry about that. Here, let me try again.”

She makes a garbled sound that Satya realizes belatedly is an impression of rewound audio, and she can’t decide whether to laugh or just stare.

“Hi I’m Hana I don’t think we’ve met whoa your fairy light things are _awesome_ do you want help looking in the kitchen hey maybe I’ll explain why I’m here instead of just assuming you already know like a stuck-up celebrity!” Hana somehow to somehow say all this in one breath, as though she had just fast forwarded through the last ten minutes of their conversation.

That makes the decision for her. Satya laughs. She hears giggles spill out of her mouth, and she can’t remember how long it’s been since she _giggled_.

With these ‘amends’ made, Hana explains that she’s a member of an elite unit of the South Korean army named MEKA, specializing in fighting one giant Omnic that surfaced every few years from beneath the East China Sea. They recruited top stars of professional _video_ gaming to man armoured combat suits.

“Luckily for us, Scylla’s so huge - oh, that’s what we call the Omnic - that any time it’s about to surface, it sets off practically every seismograph on the coast. We have plenty of warning, and it doesn’t come up all that much anyway, so we’re allowed to take on other missions around the world, as long as our superiors approve.”

“And your superiors approve of you participating in illegal Overwatch activity?” Satya asks, surprised.

Hana turns as pink as her headphones. “I… _might’ve_ … omitted some things…” she admits and Satya revels briefly in how good laughing feels. 

“But, c’mon! When you get an invitation to come work with Crisis _superheroes_ like Tracer and Winston and Mercy-” Hana squeals and bounces in her seat “Gah, of _course_ I had to come!

“What about you?” she asks, leaning forward with bright eyes. “Genji mentioned you work with hard-light, but he didn’t say what company you were from. Lunlumo? Ultraviolet? Ooh, I hear Topaasi has a VR system in development. Or are you an independent agent? _Are_ there even indies? I admit, I don’t know all that much of the details.”

“Vishkar,” Satya answers, concentrating much harder on stirring the roasting sooji mixture in the pan than she needs to.

She waits impatiently for Hana to say something, the silence loud and pressing on her ears. When she hazards a quick glance up at the MEKA pilot, she looks embarrassed, and manages a quiet “Oh.”

Hana quickly recovers, furrowing her brows. “But I thought Vishkar was way protective of their architects. How’d you get them to approve you coming out here? I heard they don’t send their architects out on missions alone - that they’re practically _always_ supervised.”

“We are,” Satya replies, and glares down into the pan, angry at herself for slipping up. “I mean, _they_ are. I’m not with them any more.”

“So... you quit?” Hana asks.

Satya laughs again, but this one is short, humourless. “Oh, no no,” she says. “No one quits Vishkar.”

“That sounds sinister,” Hana points out, with narrowed eyes.

“It’s not-” Something twists in Satya’s stomach - why in the world was she jumping to their defense? - yet she feels compelled to finish the thought. “It’s not like that for everyone. Just the architects.”

“Still sounds sinister, but okay.” Hana shifts in her seat, much less comfortable sitting there than she had been a few moments ago. “Why is it like that for the architects?”

“Because they raise us,” Satya says, despite the fact that her throat seemed to be protesting.

There is such a complete silence from the other side of the kitchen island that she feels as though an earthquake has opened up a yawning chasm between the two of them and she is explaining things to herself and not Hana. “The ability to bend light is a rare one, but it can present itself as early as the age of seven. Our- _Vishkar’s_ competitors seek adults with this ability to employ and train, but Vishkar-”

“Looks for kids,” Hana says, in a tone that can only be described as dawning horror.

“Yes. With the parents’ permission, the child is sent to the Architect Academy in Utopaea.” Her parents had had the compassion to include her in the decision-making process, but she knows many of her fellow students hadn’t been as lucky. “I was nine.”

Hana breathes something in Korean, as though letting go of a breath she had been holding.

 _How did I not see it?_ She thinks to herself. A company taking children from their parents isn’t _normal_ , even if it is because the rare ability to bend reality itself is involved. Even if it meant the family would have money they could never dream of otherwise.

But hadn’t she done good things with Vishkar? Hadn’t she singlehandedly built neighbourhoods for people displaced by flood and by fire? Hadn’t she helped _them?_

Hadn’t she saved a little girl’s life?

 _Yes, but not before you were the cause behind the disaster that nearly killed her,_ a voice like a snake hisses back in her mind. Stupid, stupid, _stupid_ little girl. She never should have said yes. She should’ve stayed with her family all those years ago - maybe her parents would still be alive if it hadn’t been for her and her stupid wish to be seen as special, to dream she could make a difference-

She wipes at her eyes, trying desperately to steady her breathing. Hana makes a brief sound and, judging from the sound of her stool wobbling against the tiles, dashes off.

Satya blinks until the world is no longer watery, trying to see where Hana had gone, and is faintly surprised when the girl turns up beside her, a tissue in her hand. Despite the onslaught of negative thoughts she had just endured, Satya manages to take it from her.

Hana turns the stove top off with a marked click. “Sorry,” she says with a slight hiss, and for a moment, Satya thinks the girl is somehow blaming herself for making her cry. But then the faint smell of burnt sooji wafts up from the pan whose handle she was still holding. 

“Do you want help starting over?” Hana asks, and gives her a tentative smile. “We can do it together this time.”

Satya stares down at the pan, contemplating the mess. Hana's works echo around in her head.

She dries her eyes with the tissue. “I like the sound of that.”

* * *

She finds Genji the next day at the top of the Fox Tower, somehow managing to sit lotus position atop the narrow, crenellated parapet. For a moment, she simply watches the sea breeze twine itself around the silvery cloth attached to the back of his helmet, unsure how to approach. Perhaps she should come back later, when he isn’t meditating…

But his head tilts, a movement so slight she feels sure she would not have noticed it if he wasn’t so good at staying still. “Miss Vaswani?” he asks.

“I really _must_ ask,” she says, coming forward to stand beside him. “How are you able to do that?”

Genji relaxes, settling his hands in his lap. “Your shoes,” he says, and they both glance down at her feet. “You and Angela are the only two who wear heeled boots. It was mostly a guess, but I went with you because your footfalls are slightly heavier than hers.”

“Yes, I suppose they must be,” Satya says, and constructs a hard-light seat for herself beside him. “Is it true that she wears angel wings into battle?”

Genji laughs. “Oh, yes. Surprisingly enough, Overwatch’s promotional posters didn’t need to exaggerate when it came to our agents’ appearances. Have you seen the one with Reinhardt’s hair?”

Satya gives him a flat look. “He has hair in all of them.”

Genji guffaws, and has to put out a hand on the merlon beside him so he doesn’t fall off. Satya gives him a small, surprised grin when he looks up. She hadn’t been sure sarcasm would go over quite so well - Sanjay had only ever remarked that her dry observations were unnecessary, so she had stopped saying anything after the first few tries with him.

“I mean,” Genji says, shoulders still shaking, “the poster where he has a ponytail.”

“Oh. No,” she says, and looks out to the ocean. She’s been introduced to Reinhardt Wilhelm, and has seen him in passing a few times. He already has a fairly thick, snowy white beard. Imagining his hair being long enough to tie back into a ponytail… “That must be quite the sight,” she decides.

“It is. He’s still very proud of it. I would not put it past him to still have some copies on him.” Genji pauses, thinking. “But, I have a feeling you did not come up here to talk about old Overwatch posters,” he says, a question in his voice as he turns towards her.

“No. I wanted to thank you. I’m fairly certain I haven’t yet,” Satya says, which is a lie, of course. She _knows_ that she hasn’t thanked him yet, because she’s been agonizing over how to do it for at least a week now.

“Thank me for what?” he asks, after a moment of hesitation that tells her he likely already knows the answer.

“For telling me. For giving me that file about the Calado building,” she says, remembering the innocuous little folder that started everything.

Out of everything that had been in there, the news reports, the graphs and statistics, the rough drafts, there was one detail that always comes back to haunt her. The date of ‘installation of concealed incendiary devices’ had been in early June, at least a month before she and Sanjay had set foot in Rio.

It had all been prepared ahead of time. 

Was it really all about the money? Or had it been about something else? Power? Control?

She forces herself out of that train of thought, realizing she hasn’t continued for several seconds, but Genji is as patient as ever. “Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision, if I should’ve burned that file and turned you in.” Satya allows her mind to meander down the chain of events that might’ve followed. “You would have been locked up somewhere in Vishkar’s depths and I would have gone back to work the next morning.”

She raises her gauntlet and summons up the latest hard-light structure she had been working on - a songbird. She’s made plenty at this point, but she can’t get them to unfurl their wings. She might have to create individual feathers for them, instead of just the general shape folded to their sides she’s been using.

“But if I had done that, then I never would have been able to start - _this_ ,” she says, and activates the structure by shaping her other hand into the hamsapaksha mudra. The little blue songbird brings itself to life with a brief shake of its head, and hops from the palm of her gauntlet out onto her fingers. She can’t help the excited smile it still brings to her face. “Vishkar never would have approved of my simply sitting around, creating animal playthings, but… if I have discovered this in such a short time, what else can this technology do that they did not want us to know?”

“Yes, it’s something I’ve been contemplating myself,” Genji says, bringing a hand to his chin. “The fact that you are able to get them to move simply by thinking about it, as you create them. Do you think you could have a connection to your sculptures similar to the connection I have with ramen?”

Satya turns to him slowly, and stares.

“What?” he asks.

“You… have a connection with… soup noodles?”

Genji makes that strange half-choking, half-coughing sound he seems to make a lot around her at the same time a ribbon of bright green light snaps up his arm. Satya startles with a slight yelp, and the songbird disappears in a flurry of blue sparkles.

The dragon, the one Genji had shown her back in Gibraltar, is back, standing on his shoulders. But it is definitely not made of light this time. Its mouth is wide open in what looks like a mirthful grin, and its making some kind of oddly pleasant clicking, hissing sound. The late afternoon sunlight glints off of several tiny, perfect teeth.

While Satya stares, Genji simply rests his face in the palm of one hand. Slowly, half heartedly, he gestures to the dragon with his other thumb. “This is Ramen,” he says, and Satya understands that it is Ramen with a capital R that he has a connection with, and she laughs gently.

“You named your dragon after noodles?” she asks. 

“I was a very young boy when she first came to me,” Genji explains. “And… likely very hungry at the time.”

Satya smiles at that, but can’t help but ask more questions. “She? How can you tell?”

“Well, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’. Dragons don’t much care about pronouns,” Genji says, and carefully shrugs the shoulder the dragon isn’t perched on. “I think ‘she’ is just what I decided on when I was a boy, and it's stuck, I suppose. Oh!” He straightens suddenly, remembering something. “But they do like ‘O Dragon Lord’ quite a bit.”

Ramen makes a pleased warbling sound in her throat, and Satya turns her full attention to the fantastic creature.

Her bright green body contrasts against the fiery copper colour of the mane that starts in the middle of her forehead and trails down to a matching tuft at the end of its tail. Similar tufts sprout from the dragon’s elbows, knees, along its jaw, and, she’s surprised to see, along its eye ridges. The dragon has adorably bushy eyebrows above its liquid purple eyes.

But as surprisingly cute as she is at this size, it’s still very clear the dragon is a creature of majesty. Her pronged antlers and shortened whiskers gleam with a more metallic copper sheen than her mane, and Satya notes the claws and digits that cling to Genji’s armour, equally as tiny and equally as perfect as the glimpse she had gotten of the creature’s teeth. Every single scale along Ramen’s body is unique, each one varying just slightly in shades and patterns of green, as though each was made from their own highly polished jade stone. She can see tiny flecks of gold sparkle in some of them.

“She’s gorgeous,” Satya breathes, and Ramen chirps in approval before tilting her head and gazing down at Satya’s hands.

It’s then that she fully realizes that she’s been tracing a long, flowing ribbon of light in her hands. Ribbons were nothing new - they were one of the first constructs taught to students at the academy - but whether she had meant it to or not, this one was slithering like a snake in the air, as though crossing invisible desert terrain.

Ramen crawls down Genji’s arm towards the fledgling construct, nose twitching with curiosity, her claws quietly tapping against his armour. “You know,” Genji says, and she can somehow hear his raised eyebrows in his voice, “I believe Ramen would be very impressed if you managed to make a hard-light dragon.”

“Well then, I suppose I will just have to try my hand at it,” Satya replies. With the dragon inching closer to her, she has a perfect opportunity to observe the pattern and angles of her antlers’ prongs, but Ramen disappears in a ripple of green light before she has a chance to start sculpting. She and Genji turn towards the tower’s open stairwell as the sound of footsteps makes its way up toward them.

Hana Song rounds the top of the spiral staircase, wearing a ripped pair of jeans and a pink tank top. “Hiya, Genji,” she says, spotting him first, then turns to Satya and freezes.

She stares wide-eyed and for a moment, Satya panics - has she done something wrong? Is she not sitting straight enough? She starts to adjust her already perfect posture but Hana just says, “That is the coolest chair I have ever seen.”

Satya sighs quietly, relieved, while Genji attempts to snort down a laugh next to her. “What? It is!” Hana objects.

“Would you like me to make one for you?” Satya asks, gesturing to the empty air next to her.

“No, I- this shouldn’t take too long,” Hana says, suddenly shifting on her feet and fiddling with the tablet she was holding. “So, um. You know that conversation we had last night? About Vishkar’s… uh… business practices?”

“Yes,” Satya says, raising an eyebrow. “What about it?”

“Well, it kinda stuck with me. And I don’t know, maybe you don’t remember, but I mentioned Topaasi has a VR headset in development? So this morning I did this stream with some friends back home talking about stuff we’re looking forward to coming out in the gaming community and we got to talking about it and Dong-Min said something about he’d be willing to wait and see if Vishkar would put out a better one.” Hana lets all of this spill out with barely a pause, and she realizes it, blinking and glancing up from her tablet. “Did any of that make sense?”

“I think so?” Genji says in a voice that clearly indicates otherwise.

“This isn’t about you,” Hana declares, shooting him a dirty look.

“Well, why didn’t you say so!” Genji barks back, throwing his arms up in frustration. Hana sticks her tongue out at him over her tablet and Satya wonders what things would have been like if she had had more time in her childhood home with her siblings.

“Yes, it’s all making sense,” she says to Hana. She’s been able to follow along with fast talking business moguls for years now, and the mech pilot wasn’t nearly as bad.

“Okay, good. So, uh…” Hana’s cheeks start to redden and she tries to hide them behind her tablet. “I got kind of mad. And- I don’t have to talk about this if-”

“Good,” Satya interrupts, and thinks on it, folding her hands in her lap. “Being mad at Vishkar is something we can do together.”

Hana beams at her and Satya sees Genji straighten to attention in her peripheral vision. Grief was a layered process, she had heard it said. She had had plenty of the depression, and brief glimpses of acceptance. Yes, Satya could go for some anger, and she lets herself smile at them both.

“Awesome, okay… What was I saying?” Hana glances down at the tablet in her hands. “Right, so, I kind of went off about the shady stuff Vishkar’s been involved in, including how young some of the kids are when they leave their families. I didn’t mention how I heard it from _you_ obviously, but apparently it was big news anyway.”

“That seems… off,” Satya says, her brow furrowing. “The Academy and its students were never kept secret to the best of my knowledge.”

“That’s the thing,” Hana replies. “It isn’t, technically. But they definitely don’t advertise it either, so a lot of people didn’t know.” She turns her tablet around and shows Satya the front page of some kind of social networking or news site, bright red bubbles marking several updating threads. She catches multiple glimpses of the words ‘Vishkar’, ‘architect academy’ and ‘children’.

“It’s mostly making the rounds on just gaming websites right now,” Hana clarifies, but it hardly matters how big or small the amount of discussion was. The fact that it existed at all puts a fierce glow in Satya’s heart, like someone breathing life into a fire.

“When was this?” Genji asks, leaning forward to look.

“Only a couple hours ago. Oh, oh, but that’s not even the best part!” Hana says, practically bouncing up and down. “I got an e-mail from Vishkar themselves.”

Satya’s dimly glowing heart plummets into her stomach, the spark sputtering. “And that’s a good thing?”

“Oh, yes. That’s actually why I came to find you,” Hana says, her smile twisting crookedly as she scrolls down her tablet. It’s the kind of look Satya remembers from the Academy, from students who knew they were going to get in trouble and reveled in it. She had always disliked those types when she was younger, but Hana brings something new to it that Satya thinks she likes very much.

“They wrote this _very_ concerned letter about how they wish to change my mind about their products, considering I’m _such_ an influential figure in the gaming community. I’ve written what I think is a _very_ thoughtful reply and considering you used to work for them, Satya Vaswani, I figured you would be the best person to run it by.”

Hana hands over the tablet. Sure enough, the draft of her reply is ready and waiting to be proofread.

It consists entirely of a scrawled drawing of, apparently, the superstar D.Va in her mech, which is giving the viewer two middle fingers and the words

**_EAT_ **

**_MY_ **

**_ENTIRE_ **

**_SHIT_ **

And that Satya thinks, is the hardest she has laughed in her entire life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Various footnotes:
> 
> 1) Hammershus is a ruined castle on the island of Bornholm in Denmark. I imagine that a lot of historic ruins/monuments/forts were destroyed in the Crisis, and Overwatch helped rebuild them, both into reconstructions of the original building and into Watchpoints. According to [this website](http://bornholmsecrets.com/castles-forts/hammershus-castle/), one of the towers is really called the Fox Tower.  
> 2) Satya is making rava kesari, a South Indian sweet dish. I wrote along with [this recipe](http://www.manjulaskitchen.com/rava-kesari/) and now I kind of want to try it.  
> 3) Scylla is named after a sea monster from Greek mythology. I figured that since the gigantic Titans in Torb's Destroyer comic had a Greek myth name it'd make sense for the giant sea Omnic to have one too, though I imagine it has unofficial Korean and Japanese names among the populations affected by it.  
> 4) Had to do A LOT OF HEADCANON STUFF with hard-light technology in general here because... lmao canon is so vague about it. Like, I still have absolutely _no idea_ why only certain people can light-bend. For now I'm going with "GENES AND CHROMOSOMES, MAN, HOW DO THEY WORK". The other hard-light companies are all named after something to do with light or colour - Lunlumo is "moonlight" in Esperanto, Ultraviolet is self-explanatory, and Topaasi is Finnish for "topaz".  
>  5) A mudra is any of the symbolic hand gestures used in Indian dance. According to Wikipedia anyway, the hamsapaksha means "wings of a swan", so I figured that would be the most appropriate for Satya to use to activate a bird sculpture. Mudras also show up in Hindu/Buddhist works, and considering the overall Buddhist vibe of the Shambali, Genji's probably at least a little familiar with them.  
> 6) I got the name Ramen from NoirSongbird's fics, but I think it might be a general fandom thing? Also, I imagine the dragons are generally unique to match their individual human, but that they inherit _something_ from the previous generation. Since I imagine Papa Shimada's dragons were purple, his sons' dragons have purple eyes. If/When Genji has kids, their dragons will likely have green eyes, so on and so forth.  
> 


End file.
